Monday, May 21, 2007

Sowing 'Oats' in bulk

Its been puzzling me for years. Where did they all come from. Whenever I go out canvassing in Montgomeryshire, I seem to be related to so many people who answer the doors that I knock on. And further afield too. Chair of Cymdeithas yr Iaith. Guto Bebb - distantly. Lovely wife of David Jones, MP for Clwyd West. And many more.

And then I read in today's Telegraph that Russian and Polish scientists have proved that Gengis Khan made so many sexual conquests in his life that he has 16 million Asian descendants - which is more than five times the population of Wales. And I thought I had a lot of relations. Its fairly obvious to me now that I must have had an ancestor with the same tendencies as the old Mongolian warlord. Now that's an interesting name to consider when our first grandchild arrives later this year.

5 comments:

As long as it was just an ancestor who had Gengis' desires, Glyn, and it hasn't been passed down in the gene. We've had enough stories about Montgomeryshire politicians sex lives in the gutter press recently ;)

I also have distant family connections to Guto, so you could be related to me too!

Of course the "Ghengis Khan" gene may not have anything to do with Ghengis Khan - it cannot be proven as to my knowledge his body/tomb has never been discovered so we have no actual genetic evidence of Ghengis himself. This y chromosone gene appears to have originated in Mongolia and spread out from there about a 1000 years ago - which fits with the mongol expansion. Obviously if it is inheritated from Ghengis then it is also inherited from all his patrilineal male relatives as well, so the lieklihood is that the frequency of this gene is the result of a number of closely related men putting it about and not one individual. However, it could be from one of his generals or perhaps even an ordinary mongol warrior - though it probably was carried by significant numbers of the male members of his tribe or alternatively it might have been prevalent in one of the other mongol tribes that went on Ghengis' rampages. It should also be noted that Ghengis and his armies were mass murdering serial rapists. Which leads on to the depressing thought that actually all of humanity are probably descended from rapists as Ghengis and the mongols weren't the only ones this way inclined in the annals of history.